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A City Laid Waste: The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia
In the first reissue of these documents since 1865, A City Laid Waste captures in riveting detail the destruction of South Carolina's capital city. William Gilmore Simms (1806-1870), a native South Carolinian and one of the nation's foremost men of letters, was in Columbia and witnessed firsthand the city's capture and destruction. A renowned novelist and poet, who was also an experienced journalist and historian, Simms deftly recorded the events of February 1865 in a series of eyewitness accounts published in the first ten issues of the Columbia Phoenix and reprinted here. His record of burned buildings constitutes the most authoritative information available on the extent of the damage. Simms historian David Aiken provides a historical and literary context for Simms's reportage. In his introduction Aiken clarifies the significance of Simms's articles and draws attention to factors most important for understanding the occupation's impact on the city of Columbia.
128 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1865
About the author
William Gilmore Simms
752 books15 followersWilliam Gilmore Simms (April 17, 1806 – June 11, 1870) was a poet, novelist and historian from the American South whose novels achieved great prominence during the 19th century, with Edgar Allan Poe pronouncing him the best novelist America had ever produced. In recent decades, though, Simms' novels have fallen out of favor, although he is still known among literary scholars as a major force in antebellum Southern literature. He is also remembered for his strong support of slavery and for his opposition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, in response to which he wrote reviews and a novel.
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November 27, 2020
The city of Columbia, South Carolina, was occupied by the Union armies of General William T. Sherman on February 17, 1865, as the American Civil War was grinding toward its bloody conclusion; and when Sherman’s army left Columbia, much of the city lay in ruins. It was a shocking and painful moment for the people of Columbia; and William Gilmore Simms, one of the pre-eminent creative writers of the antebellum South, left a record of those calamitous times in a series of newspaper articles, now collected together for modern readers under the title A City Laid Waste – a book that reveals much about the mindset of the Confederate South.
The name of William Gilmore Simms may not be terribly well-known today, except among “Southernists” (scholars who study literature of the American South); but he was one of the best-known antebellum American writers. Indeed, only Edgar Allan Poe, who praised Simms’s work, had a place beside Simms among Southern writers of pre-Civil War America. Simms amassed one of the nation’s finest libraries of Revolutionary War memoirs and letters in the process of writing historical novels like The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (1835) and The Partisan: A Romance of the Revolution (1854).
Simms’s novels were so successful that, in spite of his relatively humble origins in Charleston, he was eventually accepted into Charleston’s famously insular upper-crust society; he became a slaveholder and a planter, wrote works in defense of the slaveholding old South, and supported the Confederacy when civil war came.
And as the white South suffered in that war, so did Simms. His plantation home, Woodlands, was burned by “bummers,” stragglers from General Sherman’s invading Union army; and with his home went all of those irreplaceable Revolutionary War manuscripts – even though General Sherman had reportedly ordered that the home and its library be saved. Ill and disheartened by the end of his world, Simms died five years after the war’s end.
Here, one can see some of the problems inherent in studying Simms or reading his work. On the one hand, he was a notably successful novelist, with an important place in American literary history. On the other hand, he advocated ideas that we of the modern world find abhorrent. At a time when statues of Confederate soldiers, officers, and politicians are being removed from courthouse squares and downtown avenues in towns and cities across the South, reading Simms seems more problematic than ever. At the same time, his work can provide valuable insights into the mindset of the old South, and a work like A City Laid Waste can be revelatory in that regard – even if the revelations might often be quite different from what Simms would have wanted.
David Aiken, a former Simms Society president who now teaches at The Citadel and the College of Charleston, explains in an introductory essay the genesis of A City Laid Waste. Simms started a newspaper not long after the invading Union army left Columbia – hopes for the city’s revival were clearly expressed in the newspaper’s title, the Columbia Phoenix – and actively sought out the testimony of Columbia residents who had witnessed the calamity. And it is good that the aging writer was so prompt in seeking out eyewitness testimony; as Aiken points out, “Had Simms delayed in accumulating eyewitness accounts, his story of Columbia’s destruction would have been different”, as the large number of Columbians who fled the city after its destruction meant that “Locating witnesses at a later date would have presented substantial problems” (p. 30).
It will surprise no one that Simms's newspaper accounts of The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia [the book's subtitle] present the Union Army’s time in Columbia as a “barbarian” invasion of the “civilized” Confederacy, as in this passage:
The march of the enemy into our State was characterized by such scenes of brutality, license, plunder, and general conflagration, as very soon showed that the threat of the Northern press, and of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as mere brutum fulmen [Latin, “loud thunder,” or empty threats]….The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing… (p. 50).
Simms writes disingenuously of African Americans and white Southerners being “robbed equally” – conveniently forgetting to mention that virtually all of those African Americans were being held in slavery when the Union Army arrived at Columbia.
While reading A City Laid Waste, one can see the beginnings of the formation of the Confederate “Myth of the Lost Cause” that would dominate the way many Americans, in both North and South, viewed the Civil War era for the next century. In Simms’s narrative, the Confederates are innocent, unoffending people who were just minding their own business when those nasty Yankee marauders came through, exhibiting brutality for its own sake, as in this passage:
Ladies were hustled from their chambers, under the strong arm, or with the menacing pistol at their breasts – their ornaments plucked from their persons, their bundles from their hands. It was in vain that the mother appealed for the garments of her children. They were torn from her grasp, and torn to pieces, or hurled into the flames. The young girl striving to save a single frock, had it rent to fibres in her grasp. (pp. 74-75)
Or consider Simms’s account of what happened when a Union soldier demanded money, and a watch, from a woman of Columbia: “The horrid oaths, the sudden demand, fierce look and rapid action, so terrified her that she cried out, ‘Oh! My G--! I have no watch, no money, except what’s tied around my waist!’” Simms dryly notes that “We need not say how deftly the robber applied his Bowie-knife to loose the stays of the lady. She was then taught, for the first time in her life, that the stays were wrongly placed. They should have been upon her tongue” (p. 101).
In Simms’s reading, this episode demonstrates “the cold-blooded, viperous and thoroughly base character of the invaders, while showing the spirit of our women under this cruel ordeal” (p. 100). Others, of course, might have seen the Yankees’ time in Columbia differently – for instance, the families of the 300,000 Union soldiers and sailors who had died in the war, or the 4 million people listed by the 1860 U.S. Federal Census as being held in slavery.
None of this is to say that the Union soldiers of Sherman's army in Georgia and the Carolinas did not commit abuses and outrages. The historical record shows that they did. Indeed, for all of Sherman's tactical brilliance, his ability to coordinate strategically with Grant in the great combination that won the Civil War, the fact remains that he had responsibility for maintaining discipline among his men in their interactions with civilians, but exercised that responsibility only fitfully and inconsistently. In his own manner, Sherman contributed to the way in which both Northerners and Southerners all too readily bought in to the "Lost Cause" version of Civil War history.
Over the course of reading A City Laid Waste, a couple of things become apparent. At first, as mentioned above, Simms emphasizes the suffering of white and black Columbians alike, and words like “slave” or “slavery” are nowhere to be seen or heard. Only as the book goes on, and as one reads more Simms’s Columbia Phoenix, does one see references to slavery. Perhaps Simms sensed, at some level, that his world was ending.
At the same time, these articles do show a certain sense of denial. Simms often describes the Unionists as raiders – as if what happened in Columbia was robbery and brigandage and nothing more. He seems to think that Columbia can rebuild from its destruction and then continue on as the Confederate city that it had been before Sherman’s arrival.
Simms could not see what we know now – that what General Sherman was carrying out in South Carolina was much more than a raid. Having marched from Atlanta to the sea, and then from Savannah north into South Carolina, Sherman planned to wreck the South’s entire capacity for war-making, and then to link up with General Ulysses S. Grant’s army as it campaigned in Virginia against Robert E. Lee’s rebel army. Part of the historical value of A City Laid Waste inheres in its on-the-ground impressions of a prominent Confederate who is reporting what he sees without the benefit of hindsight.
A City Laid Waste makes for difficult reading, because of the way it demonstrates the mindset that prompted the defense of slavery and the formation of the Confederacy. This is not a fun book to read, with its ongoing and increasingly dreary listings of every home or business building burned by the Unionists. At the same time, it can be useful to the historian, as a first-person primary-source document. One finishes A City Laid Waste with a sense that Simms’s undeniable talents as a writer were worthy of much better causes than those that he espoused.
The name of William Gilmore Simms may not be terribly well-known today, except among “Southernists” (scholars who study literature of the American South); but he was one of the best-known antebellum American writers. Indeed, only Edgar Allan Poe, who praised Simms’s work, had a place beside Simms among Southern writers of pre-Civil War America. Simms amassed one of the nation’s finest libraries of Revolutionary War memoirs and letters in the process of writing historical novels like The Yemassee: A Romance of Carolina (1835) and The Partisan: A Romance of the Revolution (1854).
Simms’s novels were so successful that, in spite of his relatively humble origins in Charleston, he was eventually accepted into Charleston’s famously insular upper-crust society; he became a slaveholder and a planter, wrote works in defense of the slaveholding old South, and supported the Confederacy when civil war came.
And as the white South suffered in that war, so did Simms. His plantation home, Woodlands, was burned by “bummers,” stragglers from General Sherman’s invading Union army; and with his home went all of those irreplaceable Revolutionary War manuscripts – even though General Sherman had reportedly ordered that the home and its library be saved. Ill and disheartened by the end of his world, Simms died five years after the war’s end.
Here, one can see some of the problems inherent in studying Simms or reading his work. On the one hand, he was a notably successful novelist, with an important place in American literary history. On the other hand, he advocated ideas that we of the modern world find abhorrent. At a time when statues of Confederate soldiers, officers, and politicians are being removed from courthouse squares and downtown avenues in towns and cities across the South, reading Simms seems more problematic than ever. At the same time, his work can provide valuable insights into the mindset of the old South, and a work like A City Laid Waste can be revelatory in that regard – even if the revelations might often be quite different from what Simms would have wanted.
David Aiken, a former Simms Society president who now teaches at The Citadel and the College of Charleston, explains in an introductory essay the genesis of A City Laid Waste. Simms started a newspaper not long after the invading Union army left Columbia – hopes for the city’s revival were clearly expressed in the newspaper’s title, the Columbia Phoenix – and actively sought out the testimony of Columbia residents who had witnessed the calamity. And it is good that the aging writer was so prompt in seeking out eyewitness testimony; as Aiken points out, “Had Simms delayed in accumulating eyewitness accounts, his story of Columbia’s destruction would have been different”, as the large number of Columbians who fled the city after its destruction meant that “Locating witnesses at a later date would have presented substantial problems” (p. 30).
It will surprise no one that Simms's newspaper accounts of The Capture, Sack, and Destruction of the City of Columbia [the book's subtitle] present the Union Army’s time in Columbia as a “barbarian” invasion of the “civilized” Confederacy, as in this passage:
The march of the enemy into our State was characterized by such scenes of brutality, license, plunder, and general conflagration, as very soon showed that the threat of the Northern press, and of their soldiery, were not to be regarded as mere brutum fulmen [Latin, “loud thunder,” or empty threats]….The negroes were robbed equally with the whites of food and clothing… (p. 50).
Simms writes disingenuously of African Americans and white Southerners being “robbed equally” – conveniently forgetting to mention that virtually all of those African Americans were being held in slavery when the Union Army arrived at Columbia.
While reading A City Laid Waste, one can see the beginnings of the formation of the Confederate “Myth of the Lost Cause” that would dominate the way many Americans, in both North and South, viewed the Civil War era for the next century. In Simms’s narrative, the Confederates are innocent, unoffending people who were just minding their own business when those nasty Yankee marauders came through, exhibiting brutality for its own sake, as in this passage:
Ladies were hustled from their chambers, under the strong arm, or with the menacing pistol at their breasts – their ornaments plucked from their persons, their bundles from their hands. It was in vain that the mother appealed for the garments of her children. They were torn from her grasp, and torn to pieces, or hurled into the flames. The young girl striving to save a single frock, had it rent to fibres in her grasp. (pp. 74-75)
Or consider Simms’s account of what happened when a Union soldier demanded money, and a watch, from a woman of Columbia: “The horrid oaths, the sudden demand, fierce look and rapid action, so terrified her that she cried out, ‘Oh! My G--! I have no watch, no money, except what’s tied around my waist!’” Simms dryly notes that “We need not say how deftly the robber applied his Bowie-knife to loose the stays of the lady. She was then taught, for the first time in her life, that the stays were wrongly placed. They should have been upon her tongue” (p. 101).
In Simms’s reading, this episode demonstrates “the cold-blooded, viperous and thoroughly base character of the invaders, while showing the spirit of our women under this cruel ordeal” (p. 100). Others, of course, might have seen the Yankees’ time in Columbia differently – for instance, the families of the 300,000 Union soldiers and sailors who had died in the war, or the 4 million people listed by the 1860 U.S. Federal Census as being held in slavery.
None of this is to say that the Union soldiers of Sherman's army in Georgia and the Carolinas did not commit abuses and outrages. The historical record shows that they did. Indeed, for all of Sherman's tactical brilliance, his ability to coordinate strategically with Grant in the great combination that won the Civil War, the fact remains that he had responsibility for maintaining discipline among his men in their interactions with civilians, but exercised that responsibility only fitfully and inconsistently. In his own manner, Sherman contributed to the way in which both Northerners and Southerners all too readily bought in to the "Lost Cause" version of Civil War history.
Over the course of reading A City Laid Waste, a couple of things become apparent. At first, as mentioned above, Simms emphasizes the suffering of white and black Columbians alike, and words like “slave” or “slavery” are nowhere to be seen or heard. Only as the book goes on, and as one reads more Simms’s Columbia Phoenix, does one see references to slavery. Perhaps Simms sensed, at some level, that his world was ending.
At the same time, these articles do show a certain sense of denial. Simms often describes the Unionists as raiders – as if what happened in Columbia was robbery and brigandage and nothing more. He seems to think that Columbia can rebuild from its destruction and then continue on as the Confederate city that it had been before Sherman’s arrival.
Simms could not see what we know now – that what General Sherman was carrying out in South Carolina was much more than a raid. Having marched from Atlanta to the sea, and then from Savannah north into South Carolina, Sherman planned to wreck the South’s entire capacity for war-making, and then to link up with General Ulysses S. Grant’s army as it campaigned in Virginia against Robert E. Lee’s rebel army. Part of the historical value of A City Laid Waste inheres in its on-the-ground impressions of a prominent Confederate who is reporting what he sees without the benefit of hindsight.
A City Laid Waste makes for difficult reading, because of the way it demonstrates the mindset that prompted the defense of slavery and the formation of the Confederacy. This is not a fun book to read, with its ongoing and increasingly dreary listings of every home or business building burned by the Unionists. At the same time, it can be useful to the historian, as a first-person primary-source document. One finishes A City Laid Waste with a sense that Simms’s undeniable talents as a writer were worthy of much better causes than those that he espoused.
November 6, 2022
A very important account of a catastrophic and demonic tragedy. All Americans should read this. All fair minded people should shudder at the totality of destruction visited upon scores of helpless humans.
This account is especially important, as it was written by an eyewitness to the events, and he was a well respected world celebrity of his time. There can be no doubt as to the truth of his observations.
Countless homes purposely burned to the ground, sometimes with the occupants still inside. Even hospitals or churches were not spared.
Wanton robbery, beatings killings, and rape was the norm for three continuous days and nights. And the black residents of Columbia suffered as much if not more than the whites.
This is a hard book to read. But important to know. We must not forget those victims of the demons of the Yankee army. May God have mercy on them, though they do not deserve it!
This account is especially important, as it was written by an eyewitness to the events, and he was a well respected world celebrity of his time. There can be no doubt as to the truth of his observations.
Countless homes purposely burned to the ground, sometimes with the occupants still inside. Even hospitals or churches were not spared.
Wanton robbery, beatings killings, and rape was the norm for three continuous days and nights. And the black residents of Columbia suffered as much if not more than the whites.
This is a hard book to read. But important to know. We must not forget those victims of the demons of the Yankee army. May God have mercy on them, though they do not deserve it!
November 13, 2021
Includes a fantastic introduction to these original source documents. Learned a lot about William Gilmore Simms as well as the destruction of Columbia. Just left to wonder if they’ve torn down his statue in Battery Park…
Read
May 5, 2008One of the best books that I have ever read!! A must for anyone that is interested in Civil War or South Carolina history. On my list to purchase.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews